Written by: Melanie McBride, Kurt Thumlert, & Jason Nolan

Abstract: Despite dire warnings over AI harms, higher education has chosen complicity over resistance to the algorithmic turn. In this position paper, we argue that this reflects an increasing dependence on automated, screen-biased, information-centric schemes of curriculum, instruction, and assessment that prioritise educational products over learning in practice. In contrast with practice-based hands-on learning, today’s definitively hands-off schemes of educating have all but erased physically embodied, sensory, and authentically situated modalities of learning that are inconvenient for fast credentialing. Far from ‘innovating’ education, as AI proponents claim, the algorithmic turn has made public education more vulnerable to corporate capture. Drawing on transdisciplinary perspectives on technology, teaching, learning, and assessment, this paper extends our earlier explorations of critical algorithmic literacies to consider the ‘artifice’ of educating in an algorithmic age. Accordingly, this is not a paper about AI, or a comprehensive review of the current literature, but a critical analysis of the structural, ideological, and pedagogical compatibilities that underwrite fast credentialing. We conclude with a call for a greater emphasis on hands-on and practice-based approaches to learning, instruction, and assessment that talk back to the pseudo-pedagogical conceits of algorithmic and institutional artifice alike.

Keywords: algorithms, Gen-AI, higher education, informal learning, assessment